ExtCore is free, open source and cross-platform framework for creating modular and extendable web applications based on ASP.NET Core. It is built using the best and the most modern tools and languages (Visual Studio 2015, C# etc). Join our team!

ExtCore allows you to build your web applications from the different independent reusable modules or extensions. Each of these modules or extensions may consist of one or more ASP.NET Core projects and each of these projects may include everything you want as any other ASP.NET Core project. Controllers, view components, views (added as resources and/or precompiled), static content (added as resources) are resolved automatically. These projects may be then added to the web application in two ways: as direct dependencies in project.json (as source code or NuGet packages) or by copying compiled DLLs to the Extensions folder. ExtCore supports both of these options out of the box and at the same time.

Furthermore, any project of the ExtCore-based web application is able to get the implementations or instances of some given type from all the projects (optionally using the predicates for assemblies filtering).

ExtCore consists of two general packages and two optional basic extensions.

ExtCore general packages are:

• ExtCore.Infrastructure;
• ExtCore.WebApplication.

This package describes such basic shared things as IExtension interface and its abstract implementation – ExtensionBase class. Also it contains ExtensionManager class – the central element in the ExtCore types discovering mechanism. Most of the modules or extensions need this package as dependency.

This package describes basic web application behavior with Startup abstract class. This behavior includes modules and extensions assemblies discovering, ExtensionManager initialization etc. Any ExtCore web application must inherit its Startup class from ExtCore.WebApplication.Startup class in order to work properly. Also this package contains IAssemblyProvider interface and its implementation – AssemblyProvider class which is used to discover assemblies and might be replaced with the custom one.

ExtCore basic extensions are:

• ExtCore.Data;
• ExtCore.Mvc.

By default, ExtCore doesn’t know anything about data and storage, but you can use ExtCore.Data extension to have unified approach to working with data and single storage context among all the extensions. Currently it supports Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSql and SQLite, but it is very easy to add another storage support.

By default, ExtCore web applications are not MVC ones. MVC support is provided for them by ExtCore.Mvc extension. This extension initializes MVC, makes it possible to use controllers, view components, views (added as resources and/or precompiled), static content (added as resources) from other extensions etc.

You can find more information using the links at the bottom of this page.

All you need to do to have modular and extendable web application is:

• add ExtCore.WebApplication as dependency to your main web application project;
• inherit your main application’s Startup class from ExtCore.WebApplication.Startup;
• implement ExtCore.Infrastructure.IExtension interface in each of your extensions (optional);
• tell main web application about the extensions.

Please take a look at our sample on GitHub.

You can also download our ready to use sample. It contains everything you need to run ExtCore-based web application from Visual Studio 2015, including SQLite database with the test data.

We have written several tutorials to help you start developing your ExtCore-based web applications.

Please take a look at Platformus on GitHub. It is CMS built on ExtCore framework with 8 extensions and 58 projects.

You have to have direct references to your extension projects in the host application project.json file in order to be able to debug that projects. After the extension is finished, you can use it as DLL files without need to have explicit references to its projects.

Website: http://extcore.net/ (under construction)

Docs: http://docs.extcore.net/ (under construction)